


The Woods, Dark

by holyfant



Category: Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Genre: F/M, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Unhealthy Relationships, Unrequited Love, depictions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 23:34:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10627512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant/pseuds/holyfant
Summary: The funny thing is, for all his stories, Gaston doesn't seem to have any friends other than LeFou, either.





	

**Author's Note:**

> unbeta'ed, so feel free to point out any typo's :-)

Edging out of the tavern's latrine, LeFou finds Gaston on his own in the enjoining hallway, staring intently at his distorted reflection in the mirror that's mounted there.

 

“You took long enough,” he says gruffly, straightens, gives himself another appraising look in the glass. He turns.

 

LeFou doesn't reply, instead focuses on the back of Gaston's brass-spotted reflection over his shoulder – it's too late in the evening to accurately guess at Gaston's erratic mood and he doesn't want to provoke him. Gaston's been spoiling for a fight since he missed a shot at a deer earlier, but no one has quite given him pretext enough.

 

They're both drunk: Gaston only slightly, LeFou already starting to feel sick. It's always like that; he tries to match Gaston, only to be mocked later for even trying. He's at the point, now, when being with Gaston only makes him feel all the fatter and undesirable for the comparison, and that is the point when he wants his bed, when he's drunk enough not to remember that there's nothing else waiting for him at home. Rough sounds come muted from the drinking room: glasses falling, Robert the barman shouting in fury.

 

“I'm going,” he says. He tries to inch the girth of his stomach past Gaston, too close, the hallway too tight for two.

 

“What?” Gaston frowns and sets a hand on the wall to block his path with his arm. “You can't.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“Because,” Gaston says, then pulls that face that betrays he's trying to think of something. He's an easy enough man to read, for the most part, only unpredictable in the sudden changes of his settings: from affectionate to violent and back again. “Because I don't want you to,” he finally says, looking pleased with himself for coming up with it.

 

LeFou smiles, despite himself. Gaston's approach to friendship is touchingly childlike at times.

 

“No, LeFou, I simply won't have it,” Gaston is saying now. “I'm buying you another.” He grabs LeFou by the neck and begins leading him back towards the drinking room.

 

LeFou struggles futilely. “Gaston, let me go.”

 

“Nonsense!” Gaston squeezes his neck tighter and grins toothily. “There are at least five young women in there I haven't shown my biceps to tonight.”

 

LeFou ducks down so unexpectedly that Gaston is surprised and lets him slip out of his grasp. He takes two steps back. “No.” He doesn't know why tonight, of all nights, he feels something of a resistance where there never was one before.

 

Gaston, too, seems confused by this unfamiliar behaviour. “But where are you going?”

 

“Home.”

 

“What on earth is _there_?”

 

Gaston asks loaded questions as if they are genuine ones; it's easy to believe that he doesn't know of the existence of shadow questions, of the questions contained within the questions. LeFou shrugs. “Nothing,” he says, “goodnight”, and he turns to leave – Gaston calls his name twice, increasingly impatiently, but he doesn't come after him, and outside the spring air thick with pollen, landing yellow on the cobbles like an unseasonal snow, is a relief.

 

//

 

Gaston wakes LeFou up when he comes by the next morning, carrying eggs in a basket that looks too small for his hands; he brings them into LeFou's kitchen and lays them on the table, handling them so carefully LeFou is oddly embarrassed to see it. On the red-and-white checkered tablecloth they're a row of pale white curves, vulnerable-looking.

 

LeFou still has sleep in his eyes. He squints at Gaston. “What's this?”

 

Gaston says: “I thought you might be ill, you seemed ill last night.” Eggs are a common medicine in Gaston's family – his mother says they breed strong men.

 

LeFou doesn't say he wasn't ill; perhaps he was, he felt so peculiar and he slept fitfully. He cooks omelettes in the iron cast skillet his grandmother left him when she passed. There's no cheese or onions, and Gaston complains, but he eats cheerfully.

 

It's early, the sun isn't above the roofs yet. Gaston likes his mornings fresh and his nights long; he doesn't sleep much. “We'll go hunting,” he informs LeFou, mouth full of egg. “I need to have that deer, LeFou.”

 

//

 

Hunting, when it is just the two of them, is quiet but for the cracks of the rifle; inbetween there are long spaces of the sounds of the woods. Gaston is gifted at picking out a path that avoids branches and twigs that will snap and alert the prey. LeFou tries to follow in his footsteps, carrying the rifles, but his legs aren't as long and he makes mistakes. Gaston glowers at him every time he makes too much noise, and sometimes reaches back to smack him.

 

LeFou didn't hunt before his grandmother died. She didn't want him to – outlandishly, she didn't like meat. She kept chickens but never slaughtered them; they died of old age, long past egg-laying. LeFou and his grandmother made cheese from the goat's milk, they ate the greens from her garden and the berries from the woods. He only got fat later, when she was dead and he started eating the soft butter rolls that the baker sold, the lard-laced pork that crackled in the mouth.

 

The boys at school called her La Sorcière and him Le Fou; not to his face, at first, but later they had no such qualms. He never resisted. There was no point. Gaston wasn't his friend then; Gaston never went to school. When LeFou left school after his grandmother's death because he couldn't pay the five-franc fee, Gaston saw him one day at the market hassling the baker for a job; Gaston, already tall, told the baker to give it to him – his father would buy an extra six loaves weekly if he did. Just like that, Gaston collected LeFou, made him his, as if Lefou were some bauble in a marketplace that Gaston haggled to buy.

 

Now he trudges after Gaston during the season, and even illegally during the times when the King has forbidden the hunt; he doesn't know if Gaston doesn't understand what the consequences could be if they're caught, or if he doesn't care. Gaston lets him shoot sometimes, when he's made a few kills in a row and he's in a good mood. LeFou always misses, ineptitude, unwillingness, he doesn't know – Gaston laughs at him heartily every time he misses, but he's never brought it up in the tavern, not even when he's falling-down drunk.

 

There's the deer now. The sun slants past the trees in shafts of light that dapple her body: she drinks at the stream, then listens intently, her ears twitching. Despite Gaston's size he's remarkably light on his feet. He chooses his position, crouching, he parts the tall grass like a curtain. LeFou pushes down the piece of him that wants to look at Gaston while he does this: his powerful thighs, his back. It would be a treat, and it would go unnoticed, Gaston's attention occupied elsewhere – Gaston doesn't notice more than one thing at a time. Still, LeFou feels that if he lets himself have this, it will only make his hunger sharper – and if he moves down that path, the one that disappears into the darkness of the utterly unknown, he doesn't know where he will end up.

 

Gaston kills the deer. LeFou is happy for it: not for her death, because she was beautiful, but for Gaston's good mood afterward.

 

//

 

LeFou watches Gaston with women, in the tavern, in the streets. They indulge him because they like him, or at least there's a particular type of them that likes him. They smile and smooth their small hands over his arms, light touches, fingers trailing. LeFou doesn't understand them; Gaston doesn't understand them either, but there is less of a problem there, because _they_ seem to understand _him_. LeFou knows that he should find them more compelling; Gaston exclaims often, “ _Women_!” as if they are some exotic breed of animal, distant but fascinating. LeFou simply finds them distant.

 

“Your problem is,” Gaston says, in the straight-forward brand of philosophy that he employs, “you never had a father to teach you how to see women – but you have me, I'll teach you, LeFou.” He sends girls towards LeFou, soft girls, sweet girls, girls with braids that look like sugar-dusted pastries piled on their heads. Gaston approaches them in their protective twosome configurations, tells them they look pretty, makes them giggle behind their hands, and oh, and have they met his friend?

 

LeFou has kissed some of these girls, behind the latrine of the tavern, in the taverns of other towns, uneasily behind churches. He knows he should feel more than what he does: anything, revulsion if that was what he could summon. Instead there isn't much of anything.

 

Gaston seems to like the part where he gets to beat up the offended boyfriends as much as the kissing itself. He doesn't fuck the girls – he goes to a whorehouse upcountry for that; he respects village women, he says, they're like his sisters, they're wholesome like freshly baked bread and like a good baguette their soft insides need protection.

 

“Your problem is, LeFou,” Gaston slurs later, leading the horses by their reins because they're too drunk to ride, “you have to really _pretend_ to be interested in them.”

 

“My problem is I'm fat and ugly,” LeFou says, dazedly watching the ground for stray tree roots.

 

“That too,” Gaston agrees.

 

//

 

“You would make a fine wife,” Gaston says one night; LeFou is sewing up his shirt, which he ripped at the seams. LeFou can do this because he had no mother to do it for him, and his grandmother wouldn't.

 

“What?” he says, stilling.

 

Gaston laughs, throaty. “Nothing, LeFou. Just sit there and keep sewing.”

 

//

 

But after that, he begins to talk of marriage, his eye wandering – the girls he has had, the ones he knows would have him in a heartbeat, hold no appeal, it seems.

 

“Belle?” LeFou asks, to verify that he's heard correctly. “Crazy Maurice's Belle? That Belle?”

 

“As if we have two in this town,” Gaston says, annoyed. “Yes, that Belle.”

 

“But – why?”

 

“Why not?”

 

LeFou weighs his words. “She's very … opinionated.”

 

“So am I,” Gaston declares. When the silence stretches, he glares at LeFou. “I _can_ be.”

 

“Yes, absolutely,” LeFou hurries to agree.

 

“It's because,” Gaston says, and he makes his thinking face. In LeFou his marrow turns to stone as the idea that Gaston might be serious hits fully. Gaston says: “Because I _want_ her, LeFou.” It hardly occurs to Gaston that people might not want _him_. He collected LeFou, now he will collect Belle.

 

“Right,” LeFou says.

 

“Oh, don't worry, old fool,” Gaston says, and hits him hard on the shoulder. “I'm sure we can build a little lean-to with the chicken shed for you to live in. You can sew the buttons on our children's clothes. That's a wife's job, but with Belle, _who knows_.”

 

LeFou feels exposed. He drags his sleeve over his face. “When will you ask her?”

 

“Tomorrow,” Gaston says. He pokes LeFou in the soft flesh of his arm. “You look like you've seen a ghost. Tell me, don't you approve of her?”

 

“She's fine,” LeFou says automatically. “She's – you deserve the best, Gaston.”

 

“Of course I do.” He seems happy. “That's what she is. The best.”

 

Miserably, LeFou says: “And so are you.”

 

Gaston grabs him by the neck and squeezes the fat there. “LeFou, my friend. What would I do without you?”

 

 _The same, probably_ , LeFou thinks, and he focuses on Gaston's hand in his neck, the slight sting where the fingernails make contact.

 

//

 

The funny thing is that everyone admires Gaston, but not many people like him; the men are jealous or scared, the women distrustful or fawning. Despite his stories strewn with people from all over – my friend from the war, my friend from Neuvic, my friend from when I was stationed in Paris – Gaston doesn't seem to have any friends other than LeFou, either. LeFou carries his rifles, helps shoulder his kills; he rubs Gaston's neck and tells him how great he is; when they're too drunk for Gaston to make the trek home to his cabin it's to LeFou's cottage they retire. Gaston commandeers the bed, complaining loudly about its size and snoring even louder. LeFou takes the armchair, periodically surfacing from drink-thickened sleep with the taste of leather in his mouth to see the bulk of Gaston in his bed. Those are the few times that he allows himself to look.

 

//

 

They fight after Belle turns Gaston down the second time; Gaston's pride is an easily trampled thing, and he goes from needing reassurance to needing violence quickly. LeFou is only half a willing participant – Gaston doesn't know how to hold anything back, he will fight outright: blacken his eyes and split his lips, bruise his sternum and hold his head in the lock of his elbow until LeFou's vision flickers.

 

“Gaston –” he gasps.

 

“How dare she,” Gaston hisses, then: “Hit me, LeFou, come on –”

 

LeFou tries to do so, desperate lunges that have Gaston laughing cruelly. In calmer moments Gaston sometimes tries to teach him sparring moves, but LeFou can't ever remember these when they're fighting for real.

 

“You can do better,” Gaston snaps, and deals him a devastating blow to the nose.

 

By accident LeFou catches him full in the chest with his fist; Gaston coughs and recovers quickly, wheezing an encouragement. LeFou thinks he might have broken his thumb. “Stop,” he tries to say, his nose now streaming with blood. “Gaston, stop,” but there is no stopping Gaston, his world isn't made for stopping, it's made for drinking and fucking and fighting, and Gaston generates enough gravity to have his own orbit that he can't be pulled from.

 

“Duck,” Gaston advises, and LeFou does, narrowly avoiding his fist. He's aware that Gaston could kill him if he wanted.

 

//

 

Belle disappears during the summer. No one seems to know where she's gone; her father left, too, though people recall that they left separately. Nobody knows much about their business. Eighteen years of living in the village still translates to being a recent immigrant, an outsider.

 

Gaston goes on one of his trips to the brothel. As always, he extends an invitation to LeFou to join him. “It'd do you good, old fool,” he says this time, frowning as he looks LeFou up and down, as if there's something vaguely distasteful about him. He doesn't know LeFou has never had a woman – Gaston is easy to lie to, and his trust is like a dog's: once earned, it can't be lost. Still, it seems that he senses now that something about LeFou is not quite right, that some integral piece of masculinity is missing.

 

LeFou has never said yes to these invitations, but now he does. Gaston seems as surprised as he is. On the way LeFou presses him carefully about marriage: “Do you really want it,” he says, “you're still so young,” and Gaston talks about coming home with a boar over his shoulder to a house full of children and a wife behind the stove. _Yes, of course_ , LeFou thinks, _th_ _at_ _is what we should want._ Try as he might he can't cast Crazy Maurice's Belle in the role of that wife – she's too flighty, too dreamy, her head bursting with ideas – and try as he might, he can't see himself as that man, either.

 

The whore is business-like; she says her name is Jeanine; he knows it's probably not. Technically he knows what to do but he's scared he won't be able to perform. Her white-powdered cheeks and exaggerated lashes are extravagantly unerotic to him: the corset she's wearing has left creases in her skin where it's too tight. When she bares her breasts he looks at them and wonders, a bit hysterically, what all the fuss is about.

 

“Would you rather I spanked you for a bit?” He stares at her in horror. “You just seemed the type,” she says, shrugging. He doesn't know how to hide how unhinged he feels. “You can think of something else, luv,” Jeanine says, sounding bored. “I don't mind.” She grabs his crotch; he starts.

 

In the room next to him he can hear the murmur of Gaston's baritone, the answering giggles of his chosen girl.

 

“Listen, luv,” Jeanine says, “as long as I get paid I don't give a shit about what we do.”

 

“No,” he says, too quickly, then reddens, “I mean – I have to –”

 

“Oh, it's like that, is it?” She smiles, now. “Not to worry, we get that a lot.”

 

He wants to ask: _do you? Do you really?_ But he's not sure it would be a relief to hear the answer, doesn't even know if what she assumes to be his problem is in fact truly his problem. In the next room the conversation has halted; there are now the beginning moans of the woman, and, more clearly, Gaston's low grunts. The walls are thin: they can hear the smack of flesh on flesh. LeFou blinks. In a horrible detached way, as if he's no longer in control of his faculties, the image forms before him of Gaston fucking this girl: his broad back, the muscle of his arse working. It's precisely the sort of thing he's never allowed himself to think about before, but the image comes to him fully formed, as if it had just been waiting.

 

Gaston swears in the next room, the girl is panting, the sounds are quickening.

 

“Oh,” LeFou breathes.

 

“There we are,” Jeanine says. “Think of _whatever_ you need.” Her smile is knowing. She palms his cock through his breeches. “There we are,” she says again.

 

//

 

They sleep in a hotel after they leave the whorehouse, each on their own narrow bunk. The place reeks of boiled cabbage. Gaston, relaxed after releasing his sexual energy, had blithely talked the entire walk there, praising his own prowess, reminiscing about other notable exploits. He had tried to bait LeFou into going to a tavern, but LeFou had affected a headache – “Ah yes, from the exertion,” Gaston had said, grinning broadly. Perhaps it was good that he was completely oblivious to others' emotional states: LeFou was fairly sure he had no inkling that anything was wrong.

 

He lies awake, now, studying the mould growth on the ceiling. Gaston is snoring, and the reminder that he's there is not particularly welcome. There's shouting in the street and the sounds of horses and coaches skidding across the cobbles. It's like his bones have turned to water; he feels weak, disjointed, leaking out of his skin. Something has burst and now it can't be contained again. The aftershocks of what happened are physical: a remaining tremor of the orgasm that he had still reverberates through his body, inflaming his nerves. It had been quick, both out of inexperience and his acute realisation halfway through that he would only be able to come by shutting his eyes and imagining that it was him with Gaston, that the sounds he heard from the other room were his to hear – he matched Gaston's rhythm, stroke for stroke, desperate to finish before Gaston did; Jeanine had caught on and had been quiet as he had pounded into her without reserve, his eyes tightly shut, trying to reconcile the opposing input of his senses with the overpowering fantasy in his mind's eye. And now the idea of it is there, the image of it: Gaston's body on his, the weight that LeFou has felt during their fights. The hard line of his cock against LeFou's thigh. These thoughts are unbidden, he can't stem their flow. The guilt opens up a dark chasm in his gut. When he closes his eyes, these ideas – Gaston splayed naked on a bed, his cock resting lightly against LeFou's lips, his hands pulling back LeFou's head by his hair – light up in the dark. They have made a home in his head. It has a taste, too, this secret: musty and old, like water from a still-standing well.

 

He should never have come here.

 

//

 

 _I'm an invert_ , he thinks blankly as they make the journey back, _I'm a sodomite,_ _I'm bent, I'm diseased. I'm an invert. I'm a sodomite. I'm bent. I'm diseased. I'm an invert. I'm a_ _sodomite. I'm bent. I'm_ _–_

 

“LeFou,” Gaston yells, “you're going the wrong way, you imbecile!”

 

//

 

Back at their old domain in the town tavern, Gaston is unusually brooding. He sits in his leather chair, legs thrown out in front of him, chin in hands. LeFou would ask him what he's thinking about, but in his current state the possibility of the answer is terrifying. He drinks instead.

 

And then Maurice arrives, flailing, shouting. A beast, he says, a monstrous beast, more than human, less than human … it has Belle. The tavern is suspended between disbelief and horror.

 

“I'll help,” Gaston says, rising from his throne like a king. “I'll help, Maurice.”

 

He looks at LeFou. LeFou is momentarily thrown by the grimness of his expression; there is something steely in it he's never seen before on Gaston's face. But he knows, now, that he is in those dark woods where he knew this path would lead, with no guiding light but the familiar form of Gaston. He knows that he must do whatever it is Gaston will tell him to do: he must do penance, he must atone, _I'm an invert, I'm a sodomite, I'm bent, I'm diseased_ , the only absolution can be in being at Gaston's mercy, even if Gaston doesn't know which crime has been committed.

 

“Yes,” LeFou says, turning towards the hysterical old man. “Of course we'll help you, Maurice.”


End file.
